The Rise and Fall of the American Motel

When John Steinbeck imagined Route 66 as "Flying Road" in 1939, he evoked the Depression-era immigrants pushed off the land by failed crops, unforgiving dust, and unforgiving riverbanks. The painful reality.

Struggling to find some sense of home on the road, these environmental and economic refugees search for hope against a backdrop of unfathomable loss. On the way to California, they rested and recuperated in army surplus tents, a hastily built Department of Transportation camp and a Sears Roebuck chicken coop hut.

They have a hard time imagining the surreal indulgences of the tourist trail that began to emerge after World War II: renting a room built like a country cabin and decorated with plastic flowers; photographing neon cacti glowing through half-curtains Photo; sleeping in a concrete tent taken from Native American culture.

In short, they could never have foreseen the rise of roadside motels.

After their heyday in the mid-20th century, the traditional mom-and-pop motel — once a ubiquitous presence on America’s highways and byways — has largely fallen out of the public imagination.

Today's road trippers often prefer accommodations with professional sites, guaranteed fast internet connections, and guaranteed easy interstate access, away from traveling along two-lane roads and numbered highways Built in an old motel, head to Seed.

As Mark Oakland writes in No Room: The Rise, Death, and Reinvention of the American Motel, there were approximately 16,000 motels operating in 2012, more than in 1964. The number of households dropped sharply from the peak of 61,000. This number is sure to fall further in subsequent years.

Even so, efforts to preserve Maternity Motels—particularly along Route 66, “The Greatest Highway”—suggest that many historians and motorists are eager to reclaim some that have not yet been fully The lost motel spirit. In front of the motel…farmer’s field

“To understand America, drive its own highway.”

During the first three decades of the 20th century, America solidified its love affair with the automobile . For the first time, most people, regardless of their struggles or status in life, could jump in a car, hit the road, and escape the places and circumstances that constrained them.

Of course, interstate travelers today have few amenities. In western Mississippi, camping is the most common option instead of expensive hotels. The convenience and anonymity of a field or lakeshore is an attractive option for motorists who don't want to walk through stuffy halls in road attire.

Back east, Tourist House offers an alternative to hotels. If you look around a dusty attic or antique store, you can still find cardboard signs advertising "Rooms for Visitors." For example, an advertisement for a temporary visitor home in Ocean City, Maryland, reads "Room, running water, shower from room." Apartments, modern conveniences. Specials in April, May, June and after Labor Day. Temporary Tourist Homes in Ocean City, Maryland (Author provided

) Because tourist homes are often located in towns, they differ from most modern motels, which are often located near highways and away from the city. center. However, every tourist home is as unique as their owners. In doing so, they contributed to a central American motel tradition: mom-and-pop ownership. Fill your tank and grab a bite

As the Great Recession wore on, it became profitable to offer more amenities than just a campground. A farmer or businessman would contract with an oil company to install a gas pump and put up a few shacks. Some are prefabricated, some are handmade - rickety, but original. In the book "American Motels," the author gives an example of a typical "Cabin Campground" tour:

"At U-Smile Cabin Campground... the arriving guest signs the registration desk, and then Payment. Mattresses are a dollar for rentals in cabins; mattresses for two are twenty-five cents more, and blankets, sheets, and pillows are fifty cents more. The manager takes guests to theirs on a treadmill. Cottage. Each guest was given a bucket of water from a fire hydrant outside and a bucket of firewood in the winter. By the 1930s and 1940s, the Farmhouse Courtyard (also known as a tour The grounds became a classic alternative to dingy cabin camps. Each cabin was standardized in a theme such as "rustic" or "ranch," and most were built around a New Hampshire lawn. The English village east of the White Mountains advertised: "Modern and homelike, these bungalows attract thousands of tourists who visit this scenic spot in Franconia Notch. ” A postcard depicting Card Cow, an English village in eastern New Hampshire

Unlike downtown hotels, the course is designed to be car-friendly. You can park next to individual rooms or Underneath parking lots. As gas stations, restaurants and cafes begin to pop up in these roadside havens.

Sanders' Courtyard and Cafe in Corbin, Ky., advertises "plete accommodations with tile baths, (rich hot water), carpet floors, "Perfect Sleeper" beds, air conditioning, It's steam heated, has radios in every room, is open year-round, and yes, the food includes fried chicken developed by KFC's famed Colonel Harland Sanders as a motel in the 1930s and 1940s. Then, in the second, individual cabin campground and cabin yard owners, known as "courtiers," came to dominate the roadside haven trade (in addition to Lee Torrance and his fledgling Alamo Court chain). During World War I, nearly everything related to road travel was rationed, and tires, gas, and leisure time were all at a premium. However, many troops deployed overseas across the country saw some of the places in the United States where they found themselves. I wanted to revisit these places when I returned.

After the war, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, frustrated by the difficulty of moving tanks across the country, promoted a plan modeled after Germany's highways: the Federal Interstate Highway System. But the first of four lanes will take 10 years to be built, and until then families take to every available road - cruising along the country's twists and turns. They can easily visit small towns and landmarks whenever it suits them

At night, they discover the car park - no longer isolated cabins, but fully integrated under a single roof. The architecture - illuminated by neon lights and designed with flair - they would soon be called "The Motel," a name coined by the owners of Milestone Mo Tel (short for Motel) in San Luis Obispo, California. /p>

While motel rooms are plain and functional, their facades capitalize on regional styles (and occasionally stereotypes), using stucco, adobe, stone, brick—whatever is convenient—to attract guests. .

Families traveled in droves to other stops that multiplied on postwar America's highways, and many of the owners settled on Roy's Motel and Cafe for a lifetime's work. Amboy, California, along Route 66 (Photographer Nature/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA)

In the 1950s and 1960s, there was no way around it. Interstates built out of crowded downtowns began snaking across the country, and soon chains like Holiday Inn made small drive-ins obsolete, blurring the distinction between motels and hotels. The excitement of discovering the unique look and feel of roadside motels gave way to double- and triple-decker structures, giving way to the same reassurance that owners from coast to coast

Today. Using the interstate highway system, few people go out of their way to find roadside motel Els. Few people remember the tradition of dictators and traveling courts. However, a growing number of conservancies and intrepid cultural explorers have begun to hit the exits and hit the old roads again—exploring the remnants of Route 66, Route 40, and U.S. Route 1—and looking around the bends a unique experience. There's No Place to Escape

You could say that the mom-and-pop motel has also lost something in this decline in modern American life: it's lost friction, it's lost distance, it's lost character. In my book Cities Everywhere: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Ubiquity, I write that a nation is defined less by tourism than by the illusion that one can bring together the whole world—the whole world. The world is all a same, reliable part, at least, and you can swim in a safe interior without fear of surprises. Fortresses of the same: Thousands of Holiday Inn hotels now dot the American landscape (meshal alawadhi/flickr)

There is fun, and a certain degree of satisfaction, in this fantasy. But something is missing. I wouldn’t necessarily call it “authentic,” but we can imagine that motels—those past and present—represent a pleasant and peculiar fantasy of freedom: an escape from constant flow and effortless connection. approach on the global continuum.

It's a departure from everyday life, where travelers can still create a new persona, a new past, a new destination. Andrew Wood, professor of communications at San Jose State University